Exploring Nomad Use-cases

Eric Wright
TECHNOLOGY EVANGELIST

@DiscoPosse www.discoposse.com
“If your only tool is a hammer then
every problem looks like a nail.”
Abraham Maslow
Overview Ephemeral containers on Nomad
Persistent, stateful workloads on Nomad
Batch workloads on Nomad
The Wired Brain Coffee use-case
Nomad: the bigger value picture
Ephemeral Containers on Nomad
Docker support out-of-the-box
- Cloud-native applications ideal targets
for Nomad
- Optimistically concurrent with parallel
schedulers ensures better
performance and faster deployments
Multi-cloud support
- Deploy containerized workloads
across multiple clouds and on-
premises
- Assign constraints and requirements
to the job and let Nomad allocate
Run locally using same platform for
better conistency
Persistent, Stateful Workloads on Nomad
 Some workloads may be
long-running VMs or
containers
Host volumes can be
presented to the workload
Portworx also currently
supported for persistent
volumes
Additional Needs of Stateful Workloads

Assume non-persistent networking – use application load balancers

and deploy Consul for service discovery

Monitoring and logging must be considered

Constraints of persistence introduce operational challenges (e.g.

security, patching)

Remote management (e.g. SSH, RDP) must be considered

Batch Workloads on Nomad
Apache Spark is a well-documented
platform with Nomad integration
- Use Nomad as a common scheduler for
containers, VMs, and batch
- Nomad handles performance and
deployment / management of
workloads
- Better use of shared infrastructure

Use TPU/GPU/FPGA awareness for better

performance
- Native understanding of infrastructure to
leverage faster parallel processing
The Wired Brain Coffee Use-case
Application Re-Platform Project
- As the new team lead at Wired
Brain Coffee you have been
brought in to redesign the web
and purchasing application
infrastructure with hopes to use
a common underlying platform
that can run on-premises and on
any cloud.
- Because they use different types
of platforms, some are long-
running and some are tasks and
jobs that only run occasionally,
you have chosen to evaluate
HashiCorp Nomad.
 Nomad Consumer Personas

Development Team Operations Team

All-in on more SRE/DevOps Comfortable with KVM/Qemu on
methodologies and using current OpenStack and native
Terraform + Vault today for cloud (AWS + GCP)
current platforms infrastructure
 Wired Brain Coffee Application Patterns

Containerized applications

30%
Stateful, persistent applications

70%
 Wired Brain Coffee Workload Patterns

Containerized workloads

65%
Stateful, persistent workloads

35%
 Wired Brain Coffee Infrastructure Patterns

On-premises

60%
Public Cloud

40%
 Wired Brain Coffee Goals

Unified approach to Limit technical lock-in Nurture a DevOps

infrastructure with infrastructure culture with a strong
deployment where providers foundation in
possible Infrastructure-as-Code
Why Nomad Works for Wired Brain Coffee

Common Platform Less Provider Lock-in Codified Infrastructure

Diverse workload Higher abstraction and Better suited to DevOps
support application portability practices

Workflow Integration Strong Ecosystem

CI/CD and secrets Supported and growing
management (company and platform)
 The Wired Brain Coffee Applications

Purchasing Web Application Machine Learning for

Application Framework B2B + B2C Systems
Custom Java All internal and Leverage best-of-
application with applications being breed ML
additional Big Data deployed as cloud- infrastructure for next-
goals for growth native web apps generation apps
Nomad: The Bigger Value Picture
Match Requirements to Capabilities
Use your business requirements to map
potential logical and physical solutions
Manageability with a common scheduling
platform has tangible and intangible value
Always evaluate your application needs first
 Betting on Nomad

Common scheduling Global state Tuned for

framework awareness performance

Multi-cloud Strong ecosystem Highly available and

out-of-the-box rapidly scalable
 Explored containers use-cases on Nomad

Summary Discussed how persistent, stateful

workloads work on Nomad
Reviewed batch use-cases on Nomad
Mapped Nomad capabilities to the Wired
Brain Coffee use-case
Revisited the “big picture” reasons for
Nomad